Holy: Book 4

Room Service

To promote the release of the first book in a line of inexpensive Kindle books I'm starting to help put food on the table (literally), here is an early update! I'd put another one right after this one, but since that often confuses readers who just drop by and skim down to the latest chapter before seeing if there were any before it, I think I'll just wait for Monday. In the meantime, check out my new book I've been working so hard on!

It's called "Wendy" You can find it on Amazon under the pen name T.S. Lowe. ^.^ I'll include its synopsis at the end of this chapter.

Like a parent intent not to let their children be spoiled, Naru ran us ragged carrying a billion tons of equipment across several floors of parking garage to the elevator, setting up cameras in each of our rooms, catching various managers in various meeting rooms for final check ins, and running up and down the entire hotel to get temperature readings on each of the floors. He also tasked us with hiding thermographers on every floor, which one of the superintendents was more than a little insanely tense about doing. I couldn't even step right without one of his eyeballs bulging at me, so Naru ended up following him around to the security room, which they had offered to us as a sort of extra observation room. I'm glad I wasn't there when Naru had to explain to the guy that we needed temperature readings of each floor, not just visual.

The security personnel were added to our system and were to contact us if they saw anything strange, which meant...not much.

By the time we finally gathered at base, exhausted, spent, and stressed out of our minds, it was thirty minutes to midnight and none of us had eaten dinner. Needless to say, a few of us were a little hangry. Surprisingly, I wasn't one of them. I just turned into zombie and collapsed on the floor the first chance I got, moaning for brains.

"Where's Naru?" groaned Takigawa.

There were general, garbled mumbles (more like ape noises), of 'I dunno.' Even Lin wasn't doing much other than sitting there and staring at the control console as though it could awake his calorie deprived soul.

As though summoned by the dying moans of his crew, Naru appeared, along with a rolling tidal wave of delicious, meaty scent. All of us perked up like dogs. He carried several bags of aluminum wrapped somethings.

"Philly cheese steak sandwiches," he dropped them on the nearest table. "Dig in."

Those sandwiches didn't stand a chance. We didn't even bother using the sofas allotted to the small meeting room we were given, we just sat in a circle on the carpet and munched away in silence. Only Masako seemed to eat with any grace.

Naru went up to the monitors, munching on his own sandwich. We had had to bring in two of our longest tables, so Naru faced an L-shaped wall of screens that took up two walls of the meeting room. The modern paintings that had been behind them were nowhere to be seen.

I watched him count each pair of monitors; one pair for each floor of the hotel, then a pair for each one of our rooms on the eighteenth floor.

"Mai, did you order any room service?"

I snorted. "Forget how, when? I haven't even seen that room since we set up cameras."

His jaw, which had been chewing, stilled. The next second, he flicked on the recording switch and turned on the speakers. White static picked up over the room.

In one smooth movement, Lin stood and was at Naru's side, staring at those same monitors. He was soon joined by Takigawa, then John, and finally me.

On the screen there was a dark haired woman, sitting on the end of my bed. She wore what could have been a white polo and pants (hotel cleaning crew, right?), but she didn't seem to be doing anything other than sitting there.